“We generally aren’t really thinking, ‘What’s the next checkbox?’” Richmond said. “In the case of both Amaya and Toph, it comes from a place of wanting to reach a diverse audience,” Ehasz said. In other cases, the team is driven by wanting to appeal to more types of people. “We wanted the king’s sons’ differing races to instantly clue viewers into the fact that they’re step-brothers,” Ehasz said. In some cases, diversity is used for storytelling purposes. The only real pushback is about what jokes are funny.” “Our writers’ room is a pretty diverse group. “There’s never been any pushback,” Richmond said. But according to the creators, the entire room was always onboard. In most writers’ rooms, including non-traditional characters in these roles would take some convincing. The Dragon Prince is filled with varying skin tones, accents and people of differing abilities. “We imagined this as something Amaya developed over the years: She didn’t want anyone to ever get anything by her, so this is something she’d put time into.” “We knew how uncommon it is in the deaf community to be able to read lips well,” Ehasz said. Viewers learn that this is how she “listens” to other characters when Amaya tells the elf character Rayla to look at her when she’s talking to her. The team did their homework in an attempt to properly depict Amaya, but there’s one area where the creators admit they sacrificed authenticity for smoother storytelling - whether Amaya would be able to read lips, Ehasz said. “We had all of the animators look at reference video to properly animate the character’s speech.” “Our writers’ room is a pretty diverse group. to sign what we wanted Amaya to say, making sure it was all correct,” Richmond said. Amaya speaks using American Sign Language, or ASL, meaning the animators were tasked with properly depicting the intricacies of sign language in a cartoon. “On the production side, the biggest task was making sure everything was accurate,” Justin Richmond, Dragon Prince’s other co-creator, said over the phone. It was a huge challenge, but worth it to get those details right.” We encouraged the writers to dive into all of this and understand as much as they could. “We had a lot of conversations with people we knew who were deaf or hard of hearing, with interpreters and with organizations that support the deaf community. “As we brought Amaya to life, it was critical to us that she felt authentic,” Ehasz said. Realizing General Amaya in Dragon Prince wasn’t easy for the team. There’s a reason animated shows aren’t teeming with characters who use sign language. “Creating Amaya was a huge challenge, but worth it to get the details right.” These traits live on in Dragon Prince’s Amaya. “Instead of making Toph a big, male character, we wanted to make her a small, female character whose presence was huge.” Toph’s lack of sight allowed her to approach battles in ways other characters wouldn’t. “Toph was Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko’s idea, originally,” Ehasz said. At any given moment in a battle, when everyone else is distracted by the noise and chaos of the fight, Amaya is focused and in the zone.”įans of Avatar: The Last Airbender, a show Ehasz worked on for three years, might be reminded of the character Toph, who was blind. “The senses she was born with have shaped who she is. “Her deafness is integrated into her skillset as a general,” Ehasz said in a phone interview. According to Dragon Prince co-creators Aaron Ehasz and Justin Richmond, Amaya’s deafness was a deliberate choice on their part.
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